I've been struggling for a while to get CUPS to work with a HP OfficeJet G85 connected via USB directly to my machine.

1. If I use cups.unc everything appears to set up OK. I chose a Deskjet 900 series driver as per the hplip site on Sourceforge and tried a test page. The test page print job apparently completes OK, there are no error message, but nothing prints.

2. If I use apt-get to install hplip from oldstable, I can use some of the utilities to check that my printer is seen OK:

Again, there are several debs that are required that are not mentioned in the list of dependencies for hplip.

Apart from the test page (only from cups, not from hp-testpage), I could not get anything else out of the OfficeJetG85 - I tried to print from Firefox but got an error about gtk and widgets(?). Using an OfficeJetK80 I did not get any errors but also did not get any test page or other print.

Can it really be so hard to print (and this is without speaking of faxes or scanning)?